Journal: Battle for the Soul of America

At every level, across every domain, a battle for the soul of America is raging. We addressed the “Paradigms of Failure” in 2008; more recently Peggy Noonan has spoken and written about the collapse of all of our institutions, and Thom Hartmann has written aboutThe Crisis of Western Culture at the same time that others write of the Broken Branch, the Cheating Culture, Running on Empty, and so on. The Tea Party Partiots movement is catching on in a manner that the Committee for a Unified Independent Party (CUIP) has not caught on. The reason is simple: the first is a bottom-up deeply felt populist movement, while the latter is a top-down umbrella organization loath to break completely with the two-party monopoly.

Below is a story on how Ron Paul, arguably the longest running voice for Constitutionalism within the Republican Party, and Sarah Palin, the very likeable “First Mom” so badly handled by the Bushies striving to undermine John McCain’s candidacy, are fighting for the soul of the Tea Party.

The answer is the same answer that gets A’s in Comparative Economics–this cannot be about one or the other, it must be about “all of the above” coming together. There is one thing, and one thing only, that all of the independent candidates can and must agree on: Electoral Reform in time for 2010 (four reforms including instant run-off) and 2012 (another four including tightly drawn districts and an end to winner take all control of Congress).

Ron Paul, Sarah Palin, Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney, even the Average American whose integrity and non-partisanship is wildly superior to what both the Bush-Cheney and Obama-Biden Administrations have demonstrated–must come together on this one fundamental, or they will be defeated in detail.

There’s trouble brewing between the Ron Paul libertarians who staged the the first modern tea party in 2007 by dumping tea into Boston Harbor, and the neocon war hawks led by Sarah Palin who are furiously trying to hijack their message.

After I appeared on MSNBC talking about Sarah Palin’s appearance at the Nashville tea party convention, several libertarians told me they were unhappy with the exchange.

I said that Sarah Palin’s hawkish message on Iran was oddly out of place in a group whose roots belong to the Ron Paul libertarians, particularly as the anti-interventionist